When there was any overture or hope of peace, he would be more erect and vigorous, and exceedingly solicitous to press anything which he thought might promote it; and sitting amongst his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, would with a shrill and sad accent ingeminate the word Peace, Peace; and would passionately profess that the very agony of the war and the view of the calamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart. This made some think or pretend to think that he was so much enamored on peace, that he would have been glad the King should have bought it at any price; which was a most unreasonable calumny. As if a man that was himself the most punctual and precise in every circumstance that might reflect upon conscience or honor, could have wished the King to have committed a trespass against either....
In the morning before the battle, as always upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself into the first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment, who was then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers, from whence he was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and in the instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next morning; till when, there was some hope he might have been a prisoner; though his nearest friends, who knew his temper, received small comfort from that imagination. Thus fell that incomparable young man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much dispatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocence: and whosoever leads such a life needs not care upon how short warning it be taken from him.
MARCUS A. H. CLARKE
(1846-1881)
lthough a native of England, Marcus Clarke is always classed as an Australian novelist. The son of a barrister, he was born in Kensington April 24th, 1846. In 1864 he went to seek his fortune in Australia. His taste for adventure soon led him to "the bush," where he acquired many experiences afterwards used by him for literary material. Drifting into journalism, he joined the staff of the Melbourne Argus. After publishing a series of essays called 'The Peripatetic Philosopher,' he purchased the Australian Magazine, the name of which he changed to the Colonial Monthly, and in 1868 published in it his first novel, entitled 'Long Odds.' Owing to a long illness, this tale of sporting life was completed by other hands. When he resumed his literary work he contributed to the Melbourne Punch, and edited the Humbug, a humorous journal. He dramatized Charles Reade's and Dion Boucicault's novel of 'Foul Play'; adapted Moliere's 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme'; wrote a drama entitled 'Plot,' successfully performed at the Princess Theatre in 1873; and another play called 'A Daughter of Eve.' He was connected with the Melbourne press until his death, August 2d, 1881.
Clarke's literary fame rests upon the novel 'His Natural Life,' a strong story, describing the life of an innocent man under a life sentence for felony. The story is repulsive, but gives a faithful picture of the penal conditions of the time, and is built upon official records. It appeared in the Australian Magazine, and before it was issued in book form, Clarke, with the assistance of Sir Charles Gavin Duffy, revised it almost beyond recognition. It was republished in London in 1875 and in New York in 1878. He was also the author of 'Old Tales of a New Country'; 'Holiday Peak,' another collection of short stories; 'Four Stories High'; and an unfinished novel called 'Felix and Felicitas.'
Clarke was a devoted student of Balzac and Poe, and some of his sketches of rough life in Australia have been compared to Bret Harte's pictures of primitive California days. His power in depicting landscape is shown by this glimpse of a midnight ride in the bush, taken from 'Holiday Peak':—
"There is an indescribable ghastliness about the mountain bush at midnight, which has affected most imaginative people. The grotesque and distorted trees, huddled here and there together in the gloom like whispering conspirators; the little open flats encircled by bowlders, which seem the forgotten altars of some unholy worship; the white, bare, and ghostly gum-trees, gleaming momentarily amid the deeper shades of the forest; the lonely pools begirt with shivering reeds and haunted by the melancholy bittern only; the rifted and draggled creek-bed, which seems violently gouged out of the lacerated earth by some savage convulsion of nature; the silent and solitary places where a few blasted trees crouch together like withered witches, who, brooding on some deed of blood, have suddenly been stricken horror-stiff. Riding through this nightmare landscape, a whirr of wings and a harsh cry disturb you from time to time, hideous and mocking laughter peals above and about you, and huge gray ghosts with little red eyes hop away in gigantic but noiseless bounds. You shake your bridle, the mare lengthens her stride, the tree-trunks run into one another, the leaves make overhead a continuous curtain, the earth reels out beneath you like a strip of gray cloth spun by a furiously flying loom, the air strikes your face sharply, the bush—always gray and colorless—parts before you and closes behind you like a fog. You lose yourself in this prevailing indecision of sound and color. You become drunk with the wine of the night, and losing your individuality, sweep onward, a flying phantom in a land of shadows."